POTUS

I think the last few presidential elections, and certainly the string of Presidents since at least Nixon, are all the evidence anyone needs to conclude that Democracy as practiced in the US of A needs reinvented. (It would be no surprise if historians of the future mark the reign of Regan as the beginning of the end of the US experiment in representative democracy.)

The upcoming 2012 election puts an exclamation point to our failing system. Whatever hope there was when Barack Obama beat McCain was quickly abandoned. I'm not sure how he managed it, but President Obama may well turn out to be a worse president than the second President Bush. Obama, while carrying on with the worst of Bush's economic and military policies, while completely buying into the narrative of the extreme right wing of American politics, and while caving into same at every turn, still manages to be portrayed as a left wing radical. (It helps that the right wing owns most of the media outlets and controls most of the information disseminated in our culture.) In addition he is now rightly regarded by nearly everyone as an ineffective leader, a man without a single moral backbone to be found anywhere in his body. He has earned the right to be a one term President.

Unfortunately his Republican opponent is likely to be the most whacked of whacked out nut cases. The entire Republican field is made up of religious fanatics, people who are sure they hear the voice of god ringing in their ears. They are anti-science, anti-education, and universally pro war. Though all claim to be "outsiders" there isn't a one of them who wasn't bought and paid for years ago. There isn't an international corporation they distrust or a working person they like. Greed seems to be the only motivation they know and hate their favorite emotion. Which ever of them eventually ends up the standard barer, in any normal election in any normally functioning society, they wouldn't find the backing to run for dog catcher.

So in 2012 we will have a President who should not be re-elected running against an opponent who should be unelectable. This is what passes for Democracy in the US of A today. The upshot is I honestly don't believe it matters which of them wins. Regardless, the US will continue its military adventurism (right up until we are utterly, completely bankrupted both morally and economically). Regardless, corruption will still be the backbone of our tax policies, greed the only measure of our economic policies, and re-surging oppression and abandoning of care for the civil rights of others, (especially anyone who doesn't happen to be "An American") the basis of our social policies. Though the imbalance of wealth distribution will eventually lead to the disintegration of our society (as it has in countless other societies throughout history) any attempt to redistribute the wealth in any semblance of fairness will be decried as "socialism" and "class warfare." We will continue to protect the very thing that is killing us right up until the society dies.

Given what we have become, whose to say it shouldn't die?